Death of the text message as Brits become app happy

Oliver Smith is a senior reporter at The Memo, an online publication curious about the future of technology. He was formerly a reporter at City A.M.

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Oliver Smith

CHANGING consumer habits mean than while more than 1.2bn messages are being sent each day on UK mobile phones, in 2014 just 32 per cent of these will be sent by traditional text messages, also known as SMS.

Despite this sea change in consumer behaviour, boosting the use of mobile apps like WhatsApp and Viber, SMS will still dominate the share of revenues generated by mobile messaging this year, bringing in 98 per cent, according to Deloitte’s technology, media and telecoms (TMT) predictions for 2014, released today.

“Despite the growth in instant messaging services, Deloitte expects text messages to generate more than £60bn globally,” said Ed Shedd, Deloitte’s head of UK TMT. “This is about 50 times the total revenues from all instant messaging services.”

Globally Deloitte predicts that 50bn instant messages will be sent per day in 2014, more than double the 25bn SMS messages that will be sent.

However these new messaging apps will fail to capture much share of messaging revenue and therefore Deloitte predicts it will have little effect on mobile operator’s revenue this year.

“Instant messaging services may win the battle for volume in 2014, but text messaging will be victorious in revenue terms,” Deloitte said in the report.

“Deloitte expects text messaging to continue to generate significantly greater revenues than instant messaging services until 2018, by which point global text message revenues are expected to have started falling.”

Deloitte also predicts that more than 50 per cent of UK consumers will own or have access to a tablet by the end of this month.